Terraform providers

Terraform has a decentralized architecture. While the Terraform CLI contains Terraform's core functionality and provides all functionalities not related to any specific cloud provider, Terraform providers provide the interface between the Terraform CLI and the cloud providers themselves. This decentralized approach has allowed public cloud vendors to offer their Terraform providers so that their customers can use Terraform to manage infrastructure in their cloud. Such is Terraform's popularity that it has now become an essential requirement for every public cloud provider to offer a Terraform provider.

We will be interacting with Azure for this chapter's entirety; therefore, we will use the Azure Terraform provider for our activity.

To access the resources for this section, cd into the following:

$ cd ~/modern-devops/ch6/terraform-exercise/

Before we go ahead and configure the provider, we need to understand how Terraform needs to authenticate...